[go-nuts] Go and SDL on OSX 10.8 "No available video device"

Hi,

I have not used OpenGL on Mac but I am trying to see if I can give some
tips.

The problem could be with SDL. Can you reinstall SDL libraries, compile the
program and try again? This may solve the problem.

Hope this helps.

Regards
dharani

I've reinstalled SDL many times using the "brew" command, this installs
sdl-1.2.15, e.g.

brew install sdl sdl_image sdl_gfx sdl_ttf

However, the problem still persists.

Any pressing need why you really have to use SDL instead of GLFW? The
latter and its go-bindings work really fine for me, both OSX and the other
OSes.

Also you'll want to have your main()'s first instruction to be
runtime.LockOSThread() in these kinds of apps.

Shouldn't be needed when using github.com/0xe2-0x9a-0x9b/Go-SDL/sdl in
particular. The package has been primarily tested on Linux (there may be
issues with other OSes).

--

The SDL docs state that all graphics and event functions should be called
from the main thread. Linux just happens to get away with breaking that
rule. I don't think this is the cause of the OP's issue, though.

(Also, doesn't LockOSThread have to be called in one of the main package's
init functions, rather than main?)

It also doesn't have to do with X11; SDL doesn't use X on OSX. Otherwise, I
have no clue, because I'm still on 10.7.

--

Hmm, i tried, but didn't manage to get SDL running on OSX other than in X11
mode. When i tried to set SDL_VIDEODRIVER to Quartz, my app crashed
immediately, i think it has something to do with SDL_main.
How did you set things up to get SDL in native OS X mode?

--

Interesting. I've never had to do anything special, in either C or Go, for
either SDL 1.2 or 2 (For Go, I use my own cgo code). How are you building
SDL? In the past, for 1.2 I've built/installed via MacPorts or installed
the pre-compiled frameworks, but recently for SDL2, I just pull from the
SDL hg repo and build SDL.framework with the xcode files they provide.

--

I just installed SDL via homebrew.

I'm not sure what the problem is to be honest, but I decided to go down the
GLFW route suggested by Philipp Schumann and it works fine

It may be different now, but in the past (still?) SDL has only been able to
manage a single window per program which always drove me away from it.

--

Yeah, SDL 1.2 isn't so cool, but I am only using it to set up OpenGL and
get audio output. SDL Unicode support on OS X isn't 100% either, I can type
many a character, but € isn't one of them. Maybe SDL 2.0 will do better,
but it hasn't stabilized and I haven't been able to locate a Go binding for
that yet.

I agree, GLFW works nicely on Linux and OS X (WIndows I haven't tried).
But: no audio access in there.

--

Has anyone got Go-SDL to work on OS X at all? I'm running 10.7 and it
doesn't work for me.

When I'm launching test.go from
https://github.com/0xe2-0x9a-0x9b/Go-SDL/tree/master/sdl-test I get the
following output https://gist.github.com/alco/5412735

Setting SDL_VIDEODRIVER env variable to x11 fixes the crash, but it simply
launches the X server and nothing more happens. I can remember making SDL
work from C on my OS, using the native NSWindow interface, so it should be
a problem with the Go binding.

I think I saw somewhere that one should run SDL's main() in order to
initialize it properly. Looking in the file src/main/macos/SDL_main.c,
there is a main() function that does initialize many things and then calls
SDL_main() which is provided by the user if I'm not mistaken.

So, does Go-SDL perform similar initialization that main() function does or
skips them altogether? Is it possible to call SDL's main() as the first
thing inside the Go program's main() and then be able to resume execution
in Go (i.e. call SDL's main() without giving up control to it)?

P.S. I want to use SDL's drawing functions, so GLFW is not an alternative.